What BOOK are you reading right now?

kickycan wrote:

I'm reading Moby Dick.

A book about a giant white dick--obviously fiction.

Are you feeling ignored, kicky?

Rory Stewart: Days of hope and hubris
Diplomat and traveller Rory Stewart, was, aged 30, put in charge of a chunk of Iraq. Robert Hanks talks to him about making literary drama out of political crisis
Published: 23 June 2006
It takes a mild effort, on meeting Rory Stewart, not to do a double-take. I knew he was young, but surely not this young? He is slight, with blue eyes and a wide, guileless smile, and my first thought, seeing him at his publishers' offices, was that this must be some gap-year student here to do the photocopying and fetch the tea. I suppose I'd expected somebody more travel-worn, marked by experience - of which, after all, he has already had more than most of us will in our lifetimes.

After a career in the Foreign Office that took him to Indonesia and former Yugoslavia, in 2000 Stewart set out to walk 6,000 miles from Turkey across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal to Bangladesh; he recorded the Afghan section of the trek in The Places in Between, his first book, which won comparisons to travel writers such as Colin Thubron, Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron. And then, in the summer of 2003, he flew to Baghdad to look for work.

At 30, he was helping to run a post-invasion province the size of Northern Ireland, in the face of local hostility, bureaucratic idiocies and increasing levels of violence. Occupational Hazards: My time governing in Iraq (Picador, £17.99) is an account of the nine months he spent in the southern provinces of Maysan - home of Thesiger's Marsh Arabs - and Dhi Qar, attempting to rebuild infrastructure and supervise the transition from rule by the Coalition Provisional Authority to self-determination and democracy.

'More than just a jolly romp with political undertones is the way it captures the peculiar flavour of Eastern European immigrant life.. . a very rich mixture indeed, as well as very enjoyable reading'
The Times

For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other - and they have their reasons. But now they find they'd better learn how to get along, because since their mother's death their ageing father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life.

Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as little money to his name as possible. If Nadazhda and Vera don't stop her, no one will. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat - Valentina is a ruthless pro and the two sisters swiftly realize that they are mere amateurs when it comes to ruthlessness.

As Hurricane Valentina turns the family house upside down, old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one of them all, from the War, the one that explains much about why Nadazhda and Vera are so different. In the meantime, oblivious to it all, their father carries on with the great work of his dotage, a grand history of the tractor.

'A delightful first novel.. an understanding of history, a profundity, and yet a lightness of touch, that are a joy... funny, touching and completely convincing'
The Spectator

Quote:

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.